Much of the media has declared calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” taboo since Texas Gov. Rick Perry started mainstreaming the comparison. But Tuesday on the Fox Business Network, George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams didn’t scold the GOP presidential hopeful.
“There are three Nobel laureate economists who agree with them as well as many other people. You know, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and even Paul Krugman said Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and it is a ripoff of young people to older people and represents a redistribution of income from young people to older people because young people will never see a dime of Social Security. Instead it will be bankrupt by the time they retire.”
Williams also criticized other government efforts at so-called “social justice,” and started with the government education system.
“You find students in countries, in other places around the world such as Switzerland, such as Japan that don’t spend nearly as much on education and their students run rings around the American students. And I think that is very tragic for a black students, that is the average black kid with a high school diploma can read and write and do math as a white kid in seventh or eighth grade. It is nothing but fraudulent education and people are using excuses like building than computers as the reason why we have a better education in the United States.”
He also explained how government efforts to engineer social justice are the root of problems all over the world.
“If you look at the huge fiscal problems around the world, at the root of these problems whether it is the United States, England, Portugal or Greece — at the root is government giving people money than they did not earn,” Williams said. “That is the cause of all the problems.”
Williams argued that he had no problems being charitable, but not with a government mandate.
“I believe in helping our fellow man in need,” Williams said, “and I think reaching into one’s own pockets to help one’s fellow man is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into somebody else’s pockets to help one’s fellow man is worthy of condemnation. And for the Christians among us when God gave Moses the Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ he did not mean unless you get a majority vote in Congress.”